Frequently Asked Questions

Plandek is ideal for organizations at any stage of maturity, but especially those just starting as having a baseline is critical for any team looking to demonstrate progress.

Teams at an early phase of agile adoption will focus on a simple set of metrics to highlight and track improvements over time (e.g. Cycle Time). As they advance, insights will reach deeper into specific behaviors and across different phases of your delivery lifecycle to enrich your understanding of how you deliver and where further opportunities lie to improve.

Plandek has been architected specifically to address scale and complexity. You can connect all of your on-prem and/or cloud instances of tools, as well as a combination of those tools (e.g. Plandek can concurrently pull data from multiple on-prem and cloud instances of Jira, Azure, Bitbucket, Github, and many more).

Once ingested, data is standardized in Plandek so that regardless of the source, the data is able to handle a diverse set of workflows, statuses, issue types, and so on, and can be normalized so that you can look across a broad ecosystem of diverse configurations but the data displays in a simple, user-friendly way.

Yes – we provide our Plandek Enterprise customers with all the help that they need!

Our Customer Success Team provide a simple framework to help you select a hierarchy of meaningful metrics and to embed their use (via Plandek) throughout your delivery capability – to drive real performance improvement over time.

In addition, we offer paid professional services (PS) packages for more extensive coaching, implementation and change management initiatives if required.

Data security is critical for all our clients and we have architected Plandek from the ground up to be secure.

• Plandek’s key data sources are workflow management tools (e.g. Jira); code repos. (e.g. Git); and CI/CD tools (e.g. Jenkins).
• Plandek only stores metadata about the development process and avoids the storage of data which may hold sensitive IP (as such Plandek does NOT store data such as ticket descriptions, source code, commit messages, attachments or comments). Examples of metadata stored include transitions of issues, the time of commits and pull requests.
• All-access to your toolsets is performed over encrypted connections. Plandek uses read-only accounts and will never change data in the source systems.
• All-access credentials which are held are encrypted with Google Key Management Service, giving us the ability to monitor decryptions and revoke and rotate keys regularly.

Plandek enables you to select metrics that are very powerful when aggregated across your delivery organization. We refer to these as ‘North Star’ metrics that can be adopted by technology leadership as the key measures around which they would like the entire delivery organization to align. Examples might include Lead Time to Value, Deployment Frequency, Flow Efficiency etc.

Plandek also enables you to track a set of determinant metrics at the team level, that drive improvement in your selected ‘North Star’ metrics, so that you improve rapidly over time.

In most cases, Plandek prevents ‘gamification’ by surfacing a dashboard of interrelated metrics that quickly show if gamification is taking place. In addition, Plandek’s ‘balanced scorecard’ approach ensures that an improvement in one metric does not adversely affect another (e.g. an increase in velocity resulting in a decrease in quality).

However, we find that in some cases gamification indeed encourages the right behaviours from teams and individuals (e.g. commit frequency). With these metrics, in particular, gaming the metrics ultimately drives the desired effect.

It is important to add that Plandek is an analytics tool for use within technology by Team Leads and Managers who remain close to their teams. Analytics are a complement to, and not a substitute for, effective human relationship management.

We have not come across a client yet that would call their use of Jira ‘perfect’.

All organizations have teams and individuals who may not use Jira in the way it is intended. Nevertheless, Plandek can still surface critical insights, as well as show immediately where any poor Jira use may reside – therefore enabling you to establish a positive loop of improved Jira use, better analytics and improved performance.

Plandek can help you improve the consistency of your Jira use, as well as engineering process quality more generally, but you certainly don’t have to only focus on improving your use from the start. Some metrics may not provide as deep an insight until use improves, but many of our new clients find that the problem is not as prolific as they first feared. For example, with Cycle Time, you will still be able to calculate the start of development to “done” to see the total time, but perhaps the granularity of the stages between start and end will be more limited until the teams improve and perhaps add new statuses worth measuring.

Plandek has a “Speeding Tickets” metric which enables you to see where Jira statuses are not being updated in real-time. This is a great example of a metric which helps you understand and improve your teams’ ticket management.

Plandek has filters to enable you to look at metrics at whatever level suits you – individual, squad, team, product, tribe, Release Train etc.

Indeed, Plandek is focused on improving the end-to-end efficiency of your delivery process – and less focused on analysing individual performance. We know empirically that the biggest improvements in velocity, quality and predictability arise from better management across your teams and delivery process – rather than through scrutiny of individuals.